


The Shelled Thing

by Sexsuna



Series: Nyanmar Bestiary [1]
Category: Nyanworld, Original Work
Genre: Anal Sex, Ass to Mouth, Cat Ears, Catboys & Catgirls, Egg Laying, Eggpreg, Eggs, Fellatio, Fetish Clothing, Horror, Latex, M/M, Multi, Original Fiction, Original Universe, Rubber, Vore fetish, Zoology, biological horror, cocksucking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-06
Updated: 2014-10-06
Packaged: 2018-02-20 03:11:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2412785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sexsuna/pseuds/Sexsuna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Saki and Hisui, two cat-eared Nyanma operatives of the Industrial Accidents Commission's Division 22 (the Zoological department) have an assignment to a rubber plantation in the far-southern swampy jungles of Nyanmar to investigate the mysterious attack that resulted in the mauling of a guardsman.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Shelled Thing

**Prologue**

  
The woods across the river always looked so sinister come evening, and the few boats that passed through the sluice, small and sad-looking fishing vessels from some village in Ryukaru District some distance northwards that found their way along the Miina River down to the fish-rich swampy wilderness. It was a perilous journey, but some traditions sat deeply rooted, and despite efforts to educate people on the dangers of said journeys, they still came through. Kaiki Yatsushite was sipping coffee as he sat his small two-floor cabin and managed the sluice. He had noticed that there were indeed far fewer vessels passing now than there had been, especially after that time some ten-fifteen years ago when a dozen or so boats were lost in the same day, and only one of the lost fishermen ever returned, raving incoherently of “swirling colourful mists” and some sort of huge creature that had attacked his party. Sure, such things could exist out there, who really knew for sure what was out there? He felt vulnerable where he sat so close to those deep limitless southern woods and swamps, whose climbing vines strangled the life out of mangroves and strange prehistoric-looking giant ferns with stems like obese pine cones, where carpets of weeds crawled over stale backwaters, huge mosquitoes, snakes, strange huge fishes with scales on their backs, five-six metres long… who could say there weren’t monsters out there? Those huge reptilian monstrosities that lay bloated in the still waters, their hides grey and thick, their necks long and heads small, bodies like a fermenting beer barrel ready to explode, legs like trees, he had seen a picture in a book once, seen it and felt… disgusted with mother nature. 

  
He turned his eyes away from the thick woods illuminated by the red evening sun. This far south, the sun set late in the summer, it was nearing ten, and yet it was still quite bright. Across the office from where he sat were further windows, these facing away from the sluice; here, a myriad of iron-red plants with thick stable bases towered. Visible beyond this sea rose a still larger structure, four enormous bleak concrete cylinders, located next to the Beriyate Region Rubber Plantation No. 17 Loading Terminal, connected to the railway network. The facility was on a site 2 kilometres long and about half that in width right by South-western Water District’s Channel No. 47, which connected the Miina River to a series of smaller navigable rivers somewhat to the north. Compared to the other side, this one was reassuring. Controlled, domesticated. 

  
As the clock passed 22:30, he got up and readied to leave as soon as his replacement arrived. He put the book he had earlier wasted some time reading in a slick rubber bag and got up and left via the steep stairs, greeting in passing his replacement, one of the recent recruits he had not yet become acquainted with; some new youngling, who he knew lived in that four-story flat-block that housed a few flats for the personnel who did not wish to travel regularly home during their times off duty. There was a small entertainment complex on-site as well, a small newly opened cinema, a bowling hall and a well-equipped library and a multi-purpose room that could be used to organise various events and meetings. But Kaiki always went home, he lived in a town not that far off, an hour by train just about, and the last goods train to depart and first one in the morning always carried with it a passenger carriage for the convenience of the plantation personnel. 

  
He had two days off without duty to look forward to. He could relax in his flat, lay back on the balcony, detach from life itself, and become one with dream and vision, as he liked to call it in his mind. He had a pet at home, some sort of turtle he had found walking slowly away from a pond in the estate garden, and he had picked it up, egged on by some imp of the perverse, or maybe just good old-fashioned curiosity. Either way, he had brought it with him up to his flat, and prepared a temporary home in an old container he had lying about (it was the floor support for an old shower that had been updated a few years back, that he filled with water and let the turtle play in). The next day he had gone ahead and picked up a terrarium he had requested from the town pet supplies centre the evening past. That was three weeks ago. Tomorrow, he had decided as he began his shift that morning, he would have to clean the terrarium. It was getting quite dirty. With thoughts occupied by such innocent worries he made h is way down the concrete path past the facility housing block and onwards towards the boarding platform for the passenger carriage. Ahead, he could just make out the carriage and the goods train with the oil tanker wagons waiting to shunt for the approaching departure. The weather this far south was often hazy in the mornings and in the evening going on night, coupled with the fiery red of the descending sun it made everything attain a hue of apocalypse. 

  
It was then he became aware of a noise just to his left, where the path veered conspicuously close to the solid concrete walls around the site. At first it was a strange tapping sound which gradually became a much more sinister scraping, and he at once perked up his black cat-ears; and there was, no doubt about it, something of a tremendous mass moving beyond the wall. Something sniffed, drew air into enormous lungs, and – he didn’t know how, but sensed it somehow, maybe it was but fear – he knew at once that it had sensed him. 

  
It shifted beyond the wall, moving, and though the wall was a good four metres tall, it reached well over it, an impossible enormous black spot that grew with each second. Kaiki did not even consider running, so great was the unquestionable awesomeness of that thing. It had no defined features, and when twitched suddenly and then came crashing through the wall, blowing aside chunks of concrete and pulverising others, he saw nothing but an onrushing blackness, like a train through a poorly lit tunnel; and before he knew he had no more things to worry about. 

  
An hours’ train-ride away, in the town of Kuri, in a small flat on the fourteenth floor, a small grey turtle was beginning to feel hungry.

  
 **Chapter One**

  
Coming from the metro station he ascended to the street via wide concourses with tiled floors and marble steps; coming to the top his place of work came into view, the 114-storey tower of raw white concrete and big square windows towering above almost all the other large skyscrapers in the New City Centre district, save the four thin 150-storey towers of the Ministry of Industry and the fat stepped rise of the 175-storey tower that protruded up from the enormous domed structure of the Hall of Councils. Along the metro station some older buildings remained, four and six storey blocks erected a good hundred years ago. It was unusually early, for Saki Kuroki had struggled with insomnia upon awakening from a mere three hours sleep and decided in frustration he might just as well to go work already. It was about five thirty, and there were not many people about yet. The air was cold and the open tiled streets were wet from an early morning rain, the skies still spotty with dark clouds which half-hid the already far-risen sun; and the fresh air brought clarity to his tired head; and when he arrived at the two-storey tall double-door to the lobby of the Ministry of Economic Planning (in the upper levels of the tower were various unrelated offices, such as where he worked; the actual planning ministry had their large computing machines and offices in a large slab block that protruded from the side of the tower; a 45-storey glass wall like an ancient fence scaled up immensely) he felt rejuvenated. There was no one in the lobby, but probably there were more than just he who had already arrived – he could hear one of the lifts just departing. 

  
In the speedy silent lift, whose interior was tastefully decorated by wooden panels and a large mirror on the side opposite the doors, all lit by warm fluorescent lights in the ceiling, he tried to control his scattered thoughts. He saw that his shiny black latex mini-dress, that fit snugly around his body and reached just half-way to his knees, had curled upwards a bit in a way that would perhaps reveal too much; not that it was a real concern, but it did look messy, so he pulled it down; then he wasted the rest of the time in the lift shifting the wisps of bright blue hair out of his eyes so that the extension of the fringe lay down the ridge of his nose, as well as correcting somewhat the teased portion at the back of his head, so that it was to his own satisfaction.

  
There came a shrill ping as the lift halted and the doors opened. He stepped out. The 72 nd floor lobby was a simple brightly lit room, with three glassy doors, one in each direction save that where the lift was. A small signboard sat on each, the one that he walked through reading INDUSTRIAL ACCIDENTS COMMISSION – INVESTIGATION DIRECTORATE. Below it, in larger print: DIVISION 22.

  
Immediately inside, there was a narrow corridor, wooden flooring and white walls with a soft texture like a carpet. In the corridor lay a door to a bathroom and two larger doors to offices (one was his, and one was his assistant’s). At the end of the corridor the space opened up to a large common room, where in one corner was the desk of a secretary (completed with telegraph and telephone), and the other a large sofa, a table (strewn with assorted paper; reports, etc.); along one wall was also a small kitchenette. There were large square windows, offering a view over the Old Town district, and beyond, the ocean-front industrial complexes and the large railway sidings and sorting yards serving them. Like little ants he could see the black outlines of the box-shaped shunting locomotives moving to and fro with lines of multi-coloured wagons. Beyond the disorganised mess and narrow streets of old-town and its densely packed low-rise buildings towered the suburban housing estates ominously; the light faint in the overcast weather, some lights were lit here and there in the many myriad of buildings that filled the horizon like some onrushing army, a frightening wave of concrete monsters. Here and there zigzagged enormous long slabs with pastel-colour façades, interconnected by open walk-ways, decks, at various levels that ran like streets in the sky; in other places protruded through thick jungle canopy of sprawling parkland enormous point blocks, some over fifty storeys tall, in a multitude of shapes and forms. 

  
He walked over to the window, and peered downwards. Traffic on the streets was picking up, double-decked trams and pedestrians moved about; even the occasional heavy-loaded carriages hauled by the large scaly-shapes of Eikou-ju. Saki kneeled down on the sofa and looked out the windows from the warmly lit office, there below, lives moving to and fro, so small it all felt from up here! 

  
Stuck in dreamy heights, he noticed not the clicking of heels against the floor behind him, and it was not until his skirt was rolled up on his back that he knew someone else was there. A hand was put harshly upon his left buttocks, and he turned around, startled, where he saw the tall handsome shape of Hisui, his closest assistant, with his big white ears and long silky-smooth blonde hair; his face giving off some vague expression of wanton lust and happy-to-see-you-again. 

  
Saki was a bit surprised, though the event itself was not unusual. “You’re early,” was all he managed to say, then he blushed.   
“I came as soon as I could,” Hisui replied briskly, and undid the lower buttons on his white latex coat that reached just below the knees, where the chunky-heeled boots took on, “you see, I woke up from this most wondrous dream, and when I did, I had this most persistent erection. I followed it, as they say, to where the cock points, and here I am. It’s hard for you.” He opened the coat, revealing his throbbing erection, already embraced by a condom; ready and wet with lubricant. 

  
Saki felt arousal come quickly, and arched his back a bit, putting his rear up; and Hisui had little difficulty getting his erection ready, prodding first in exploratory fashion before, quite suddenly and not without a slight unpleasant stinging, he had made entry; like a burglar of bums, Saki thought with amusement, and Hisui eventually put his legs up on the sofa as well, continuing his thrusting motions – and, it was, admittedly not the best position or the most enjoyable moment they had experienced together what with the way the sofa shifted and made Hisui almost fall twice – until he, in meditative silence, ejaculated and withdrew. 

  
He got down on the sofa, next to Saki, and took off the condom, he held it up and it dangled with the weight of the whiteness in the bottom; and Saki took it between two slender fingers, turning it upside-down; held it above his mouth, dripping out the contents, and when mostly empty, he lowered it a bit so that he could prod the opening of the condom with his tongue. As he did, Hisui reached for Saki’s erect prick and took a firm hold, and began to jerk it. Saki swallowed the sweet semen in his mouth and turned to Hisui, who reached with a hand behind Saki’s back and leaned over him; and soon thereafter their tongues stumbled into each other in their moist mouths. Saki was not long to ejaculate himself, and some of it got on the floor, but it was no worries. It was not the only such stain thereabout; and eventually they’d be cleaned away. What of Saki’s ejaculate that had gotten on his fingers; Hisui licked clean, and then got up and left for the bathroom, evidently struck, as he had a tendency to, by the post-ejaculatory need to urinate.

  
  
It was a while later that the current assignments dropped in via pneumatic tube post, a vast system that served most cities in the land. They had not noticed it immediately, in-fact, it was only when Hisui had gone to the small kitchenette, preparing a pair of very large juicy eggs, that he noticed the new droppings on the secretary’s table. 

  
“Are those our eggs?” Saki asked curiously, when he after being called to the site by Hisui began to sift through the post. “You know what the Germoids think about that, eating our own eggs. Barbaric, they’ll say, crime against nature and what not. They think it’s absolutely sick.”  
Hisui cracked one of the eggs open into the sizzling cauldron, as if to emphasise the barbarism. “I forgot to wear a rubber last week”, he said, “it wasn’t much, only those two, but you know how it goes. Thought they might as well be eaten? Why throw them away? And anyway, those primitive brutes are the ones to talk about barbarians. They use dogs for hunting... and companionship!” Hisui laughed, and as he gazed towards Saki, he gave a polite smile. “Can you imagine? Having one of those barking monstrosities for company, the sheer perversion of it... it’s worse than having a slug for companion. At least the slug is simple, it has its needs, and it moves slowly so you can keep up with it; but a dog, those things are just not meant to be domesticated. Did you see that report in the newspaper last week?”

  
“No,” Saki said. “What was it?”

  
“It was a special newspaper supplement with the Nyanmar Telegraph, about that whole ordeal with keeping dogs. There was a page dedicated to this accident in the Germoid town across the ravine at Border Town No. 3. A dog, which it was said might have been diseased went on a rampage and killed four of one of their family litters, then attacked and wounded at least four adults before it got itself stuck in a fence at the border bridge. The thing could have tried to cross! A good illustration of the folly of keeping those monsters around...”

  
“As to be expected from those... lesser beings. ‘They shall be judged by the company they keep’, is that how they say?”

  
“I don’t know,” Hisui replied. “But that sounds reasonable, anyway. But onto business—“

  
“No, wait,” Saki interjected. “I want to finish this egg first.” Already he was stuffing his face with one of the large fork-like utensils with one ragged edge, which was the general eating ware of the Nyanmarians. “Delicious barbarism”, he added as he had finished it. “So, what is the assignment?”  
“A few brief paper-work assignments... and what looks to be long assignment.”

  
“We’re getting to go somewhere?”

  
“It would seem so.” Hisui handed Saki the bundle of papers kept together with a clipper in an upper corner, and as he skimmed through the summary on the first page, he could tell this would be an interesting riddle to solve. It dealt with one of the rubber plantations in the Beriyate region, south of the official Nyanmar border. There was a vast region of tropical wetland down there, very inhospitable, alien to civilised life entirely in fact, whose ecology was largely unknown. There had been expeditions through the ages, some whose records survived, but interest in the region had declined in the last two-hundred odd years of Nyanmarian industrialisation. It was only recently that the potential for growing natural rubber for clothing, goods and machinery requirements was considered, rather than the tedious process of making synthetic such, was considered, when a rare type of tree-fern was discovered near the southern border – Saki seemed to recall it was during the construction of a flood-control channel – which when cut would bleed a slow-drying latex that was black with a bluish tinge. Each tree was capable of producing quite a large volume every week, and with some artificial selection, the yield of each plant rapidly increased. The tree-fern – though as far as scientists could tell it wasn’t actually such, but looked just like them (and this Saki assumed was why it had taken so long a time to discover it) – grew very well under controlled circumstances, and rubber plantations sprung up all over the place in the southern border regions. 

  
What had transpired according to the rapport was that something or someone had attacked one of those plantations (or, Saki thought pessimistically, the wall collapse had been accidental...), with the creative name of Beriyate Region Rubber Plantation No. 17, just along the Miina River. A perimeter wall – to defend against the unclassified wildlife that could come from across the border – had been destroyed. Details were sparse. A guard on duty, a Kaiki Yatsushite, had been found by his replacement in tatters. The report was brief, but made it clear not much remained of poor Kaiki, a resident of the border town of Kuri.

  
“Kuri...” said Saki, “that’s a good six hours trip. And why is it sent to us, shouldn’t this be relegated to the local accidents commission over there?”  
“Ah, you didn’t read page three, I see,” Hisui replied quickly with an air of amused intelligence. “It tells why. It’s because they suspect that it can be some attack by wild natives or wild-life. Which is why it falls on us – we’re Division 22, it’s what we do.”

  
“Any evidence thereof?”

  
“Some saliva found on the body when it was given a work over at the mortuary in Kuri.”

  
“What of it?” Saki asked, with his interested piqued. 

  
“Unknown origin.” Hisui smiled.

  
“Interesting...” 

  
“Very. Let’s forget that simple paperwork, there’s an express departing for Kuri at 8:38 from the Southern Railway Station. That’s in...” Hisui looked up at the clock. “An hour, roughly. We’ll be on it.”

  
Hisui listened to a radio culture broadcast – some novel dramatised for radio – while lazing in the sofa while Saki did the dishes. The two then headed down a floor via the stairs to the communal showers there. They took their outfits off – though technically they were all-weather uniforms, the tough Nyanmarian latex was incredibly durable and was slick and clean by nature, as long as one wiped anything spilled off it – and went in, embraced by the warm water. No one else was in the showers at this early hour, they had it all to themselves, and when they were done washing each other’s hair, Hisui got onto his knees and took Saki’s erect penis in his mouth, sucking it and tonguing it like a baby a pacifier until Saki released another batch of spendings, this time down Hisui’s gullet. They dressed again, went down with the speedy lifts at an hour when most lifts were going upwards to the myriad offices, and outside were just in time for a tram. 

  
It was a large, tall yellow box with long windows, a double-decked rolling brick, and its electric motors purred pleasantly as it accelerated. They had with them one bag each with assorted necessities and their assignment papers and various related documents that needed to be filled in, most of which they planned to do on the trip over, leaving the rest to be filled in due time as the investigation progressed and was completed. The tram stopped at a junction, where crossed ahead a number of other trams going every which way, yellow, green, aluminium, cobalt blue; and slow and resolute the quadrupedal Eikou-ju hauling heavy loads on kerbside tracks reserved for goods traffic; though small electric tram-engines were gradually replacing the beasts, their organic nature allowed them to operate when electricity supply to a section was out, like now; the thing seemed to be hauling a large-wheeled carriage loaded with heavy equipment for maintenance works. They had scaly hide and small horse-like heads on a relatively long muscular neck, and their bodies were the wine barrels of the gods with thick tree-trunk like legs and a highly held stout tail that swayed from side to side with the movement of the hips. They were silent beasts, rarely uttering a single tone, and they were not afraid of the speeding trams or the myriad crowds that crossed the streets; clouds of countless colours beyond the reach of any rainbow from which protruded the furry pointy ears; the chatter of passengers on the tram, and outside, the trees along the roads, steel railings and planted fern and rich blossoms in flowerbeds separating the walking zones of the major streets from the four, sometimes six tram tracks. The trams bells rang and it turned up across a bridge over a narrow channel, past crowded shopping precincts and smaller old town buildings that stood packed in small lots, each next to another, six-ten stories tall, some with doors opening directly onto narrow steep stairs. On a balcony above another junction a couple were engaged in shameless copulation, fucking away as if there was no tomorrow. The tram driver looked annoyed at a youthful couple in the back of the lower deck whose thirsty lips could not stay apart.

  
Two stops later the tram pulled into a low platform outside of the South Railway Station, facing the vast cobblestone square at whose centre stood a vast round pillar shaped like a factory chimney, at the foundation of which was a big marble inscription reading LIVE FOR EVER THE REVOLUTION. 

  
There were crowds of people arriving and departing continuously, and many others waiting for arrivals, meetings being had; a group were enjoying themselves in the shade of a vast Tateyaro-palm – normally a more southern species, planted here – eating from food boxes, drinking the rich white semen-like milk of another species of southern palm, whose fruits were the size of Eikou-ju feet. 

  
Saki and Hisui got off the tram and walked up the flower-bed lined road to the monumental railway station building; it was low, seven storeys tall and a sharply edged outline against the backdrop of taller towers of glass and concrete that merged in concerto into a singular urban milieu. 

  
NYANMARI STATE RAILWAYS read the monolithic inscription above, and under it, even larger: SOUTHERN RAILWAY STATION. They passed through the entrance and walked over to the reservation desk, were greeted by a friendly yellow-eared fellow with matching hair tied in two voluminous bunches, who gave them the tickets they needed to board. Long-distance services were generally reservation only – but it was only during special holidays that getting a seat on such, even just before departure, was difficult, as the provision of carriages was quite flexible and would generally match demand and then some. The station concourse was massive and the floor a bright brown and polished marble, the walls concrete and the ceiling a steel latticework overlaid with half-opaque green-tinged glass; they went down an escalator and came to the platforms. 

  
It was all light and warmth under the station canopy, and the overcast weather seemed from within like high summer; the chatter of countless Nyanmarians going about their business formed the background music to the arrival and departure of flat square-nosed electric multiple units whose rotund bodies seemed to bloat on the bogies, their myriad doors opening like the flood gates of a hydroelectric dam, and their pointy-eared fellows flowed out or struggled to get on; electric engines whirred and well-oiled wheels slid and clacked against points; they steered to the southwards platforms of the thirty-six track station, which was for long-distance services and separated by a small manned turnstile – just to make sure that travellers had made reservations – which they passed through with no difficulty. Soon they had passed the big black boxy locomotive of their express, whose sleek black gold-striped carriages each was graced with the graceful symbol of the NSR. 

  
There was still a good twenty minutes till departure, and they found their small two-person compartment in carriage No. 10, which was next to the dining and kitchen carriage. The Kuri Express ran twice daily and stopped only three times along the way, at the larger cities of Yanikuri, Takeyumitsu and Ninayagawa, before arriving in Kuri. Because of this it was not common for travellers to those towns to use the service – it was slower and less frequent than more frequent ones, and primarily served long-distance travellers to Kuri and the vicinity thereabout. The train was nevertheless a full twenty carriages long. 

  
In due time it departed. Flipping out a wooden table they dealt with some of the simple routine-paperwork. Outside the world passed by. The train passed on a viaduct over commuter lines, running thereafter alongside others; a dozen tracks side by side, skipping past stations via the fast and avoiding lines, passing goods trains, electric multiple units, other expresses; beyond the line-side shrubs and grass, below embankments and beside viaducts, concrete blocks; towers, tall; vast slabs with deck-access walkways thirty stories up; walls of nothing but balconies; facades of painted concrete, green, yellow, blue, red, what-have-you; patterns now and then; exteriors with concrete ornaments, a brief landscape of industrial estates, chimneys and warehouse roofs; a road with trams and people on it; bridges over the tracks; another station, the blackness of a tunnel.   
The train came out of the tunnel like a new-born child into the world, the yellow flowers of rapeseed fields outside the window, the world rolling quickly by and the locomotive accelerating; wet rice fields then replacing them; beyond them, the smoking chimney of a cement factory, and not far from it, rising from thick woodland, more enormous housing blocks of different types; long, neat lines of twenty-five storey slabs, thin cruciform forty-five story towers; closer by, two young boys running on a path next to the railway, following a naked friend on a bike, with his bum in the air, teasing them. Sidings, a stationary locomotive at a farm loading depot; a station; and soon, the land began to rise slowly as the line entered the territory of the Eru Lowland Plateau, the now almost entirely eroded remains of what millions of years ago had been a vast volcanic complex. This was grounds for some of the area’s tremendously fertile land. 

  
Woodlands; a city; its main railway station a nexus towards which many branches converged, a heart fed by veins and arteries pulsating with life; the station, people on the platforms, their ears tugged at by the wind of the passing train. Saki looked out at the world, took it in, saw it all flash by; a wisp of blue hair caught in his eye made him blink and he missed a scene; a derailed tram in Okamizu, visible from a bridge over which the railway went. 

  
On they went. The fields changed character, seemed more wild; the plants, whatever they were, seemed more eager to rise up; neat rows of some kind of tree-fern with round purple fruits in big bunches swaying in the wind; the weather, a brief rain, then the overcast skies were no more; out into the glittering sunlight. Saki and Hisui talked on and off for a while, reading books, solving a crossword or two together, fortunate that the train was air-conditioned. Swished past another city; tower blocks, bridges, industry, sidings; bridges, tunnels, fields, sequences; past signal boxes, overhead wire gantries at constant intervals. Tree ferns began to dominate the flora beyond the taller and taller grass that grew in the line-side ditches; the line swerved past a steep mountain side, entering a long tunnel.

  
In the darkness there came a knocking on the door to the compartment. 

  
“Open it,” Hisui said without lifting his eyes from the book he was reading.

  
Saki, bored and with nothing better to do, got up and opened the door. In the corridor he was greeted by the luminous green eyes of a lean young boy, with big purple hair teased high into loops like debris trajectories from an asteroid impact; the boy leaned forward, towards the door, and he seemed geninously surprised that Saki had opened the door.

  
“Hello,” he said, “May I come in?”

  
Saki thought of what to say, but Hisui’s voice came before he had finished his reasoning. 

  
“Let him in!” he said. The boy snuck past Saki, the boy’s white latex dress with its pleated miniskirt brushing against his own; they squeaked with the urgency of hungry wild pigs, and entered the cramped compartment.

  
“Hi,” the boy said to Hisui, who finally had taken his eyes off the damn book he was reading. “I’m Tenteke, pleased to meet you.” He blushed noticeably. “I’ve... been walking to and fro in the corridor since the last station... peeking through keyholes into compartments. Most were... busy.” He flushed even further red, his white ears parted to the sides, drooping; “You don’t seem to be, though, so I thought I’d try... I haven’t had a fuck for several weeks...”

  
“Why not, my dear boy?” Hisui said with a silly voice, though the boy could not tell he was making such. 

  
“I’ve been pregnant... and where I live, it is not considered good and proper to fuck someone who is pregnant.”

  
“What is this primitive backwater? Some far-off village that has not yet seen the light of electricity, of progress? Saki, put it in this boy! Right now!”

He motioned for Saki to do so, but he wouldn’t have needed to. The boy was already on all fours, with his head near Hisui’s crotch, and Saki was behind him. Saki simply flicked his skirt up and brought out his member.

  
“No condom,” the boy said, “I want to be pregnant again... I want to make more eggs...” He drooled as he said it, and arched his back slightly. And Saki lifted the boy’s white tail and entered, without rubber; he felt his foreskin be pulled back, felt the glans strike naked against the mysterious insides, plunging those unknown depths. Meanwhile, at the fore, Hisui had unbuttoned his coat and opened it like a cabinet of curiosities, and the boy was slurping away at his erection like a maid at one of the sex-service café by the old waterfront at home. 

  
Hisui stroked the boy’s purple fringe gently. “You’re good at it,” he said, “How old are you?”

  
“Thirty-two,” the boy said. 

  
“That young...” Hisui began but was interrupted by an involuntary groan before he could resume, “and yet so wicked...” The boy seemed to give off some sound that appeared to be in agreement, but never took his tongue and lips from the length which he worked like a tanner works the hide of some nameless slaughtered beast. Nyanmarians reached sexuality maturity between the ages 20 and 25, occasionally later, and within a year they would be able to produce eggs of their own.

  
Saki came inside of Tenteke, a surprisingly large volume of thick warm ejaculate that sprayed his insides; and Tenteke shivered with pleasure and perhaps naughty thoughts of once more bearing eggs, the thought of life forming within. Soon Hisui came too, and some of it came on the boy’s cheek. Hisui wiped it off with a cloth napkin.

  
“Hungry?” he asked as the boy got up from the floor and pulled the skirt down over his buttocks with the aid of his agile fluffy tail.   
“I could eat,” the boy replied. He smiled wryly.

  
“Come with us then,” he said, “Let’s go to the dining carriage. I, myself, am quite starved. And you, Saki?”

  
“I am, too. I’m in the mood for some shrimp and fish.”

  
They left the compartment and went towards the dining carriage; it was the next one, they could see it through the connected corridors. There was a pleasant aroma in the air, of food and spices, and the sound of quaint chatter and food being prepared in perfect unison with the muffled whine of the steel wheels on the steel rails; it brought Saki memories of journeys by train during his formative years; when he went with three of his then friends (he had lost touch with them and had no clue where they had ended up later) to fish in the summer at the northern lakes of the Kakemashima region.

  
  
 **Chapter Two**

  
At 15:24, they departed the train at Kuri Railway station. They had a filling dinner and had returned to their compartment, their new acquaintance in tow, and talked aimlessly. At some point Saki had fallen asleep, and before he knew what had happened, Hisui was pulling his arm, saying they had finally arrived. The journey had seemed brief to him, as though it was a journey he had often made – in fact, he had not been far out of Shinkyoushi, the vast capital metropolis, since he was young. Most of the travel assignments were – true but sad – to the one of the city’s several zoological gardens. 

  
Tenteke had run away from his home village – some small old village of wooden houses clinging to a rocky outcropping above a winding tributary to the Kayane River, with steep narrow lanes that were mostly steps, and a narrow bridge across the rapids of the river to the railway station on a small branch line. They had a lot of time to kill, so the story was quite elaborate. Tenteke told of a site at the top of a rise that protruded out of this softly eroded massif, at the top of this rise, which was steep and perilous a place to journey to, which must have been made of rock of different origin, an igneous intrusion perhaps into the otherwise feeble sandstone, where had been carved out of this very hard rock a flat square. It had been, in ancient times, a place for ritual egg laying after the spring harvest, with strange rock formations arranged in patterns thought significant by the early primitive Nyanmarians. 

  
The dig-site became at some point a site of a village. Traces had been discovered, little scattered remains; the rock had been scraped away tediously with primitive tools during what must have been almost a hundred years. But that was neither here nor there; the point was that eventually was erected on the site a small village, which over the years was located away from the ritual-site, at which instead began to be erected a vast five-storey temple of bamboo and the thick raffled stems of fern-trees that grew in thickets along the steep riverside. It soon rose beyond the imagination of any villager, with its steeply sloping pagoda-like roofs reaching almost down to the first floor; the upper story windows set on low protruding gables; the whole thing was an affair in dark wooden colours, red fabric lightly touched by the caress of the wind and gold-coloured accents added to corner pillars and to the stone-stepped approach that led from the village. 

  
In the temple which thanks to its location and geographic position on the planet was almost every morning swept in thick milky mists was, just beyond the reception area where certain greeting ceremonies were had and the faithful ones met daily to discuss their inner truths, was a vast hall, illuminated by small windows in the ceiling whose light was cast down by a myriad of mirrors; mirrors, too, covered all the walls and the floor was like a silvery pool of polished reflective surface. In this room much of the village would congregate during the thrice-weekly Copulation Days for unfathomable orgies the likes of which had in civilised Nyanmari society been eradicated by enlightenment. But it seemed that at least in Tenteke’s village those primitive superstitions lingered like an untreated infection, waiting to again spill into the rest of the body, eager to cause fever and pain. 

  
Though there was rapacious sex and orgies, reproduction was, at least nowadays, curtailed with contraceptives and condoms, and deviations from approved reproductive quotas within the village were not treated lightly. It was such a thing that Tenteke had been the victim of; he had been cosying up to a younger fellow who struck his fancy, a character he did not name but assured was of the most exquisite physique, with enormous black ears and a prick to match; like the old folk-saying went, the size of the ears are an indicator of the size of the penis.

  
They had engaged in intercourse one night in the Hall of Inner Observation – that was the mirror hall. The boy had been an apprentice under one of the priests at the temple, but his prick had been so magnificent, and though the boy was reluctant – to copulate without condoms was a carnal sin – he had gone ahead and done it, aroused though he was by Tenteke’s alluring advances. Though no one had noticed anything then, they had remained undiscovered; Tenteke soon started developing a slightly bloated belly, the shape which all Nyanmarians attain as they are pregnant after being fertilised. The four weeks went by torturously slow. He had tried to keep indoors, but soon someone noticed and the word was out. In small villages where everyone more or less knows everyone, the jungle telegraph, the grapevine, assures an effective and rapid dissemination of information; and only a week before giving birth, they had held a hearing in the temple, which for what it’s worth also served as the village town hall. The boy, it seemed, had confessed to the illicit deal, and accused Tenteke of being a seductive malign influence on society, calling for him to be sent elsewhere, to the big cities of the land where morals were scant and traditions forgotten or ignored, even suppressed. The sacred code had been violated. 

  
Tenteke had ceased the opportunity when it presented himself – the wind rattling the door to the temple behind him, and he was a fast runner, and they were in no position to pursue him. The elders, though not much visibly older than he, though some of them it was rumoured had been present at the Temple’s original construction, were not fond of sudden moves, judging them vulgar and unbecoming of figures of authority, and perhaps wise as their years would hopefully have made them, they knew that Tenteke would not return. And what did he care, anyway? It was amazing that it took him so long to go beyond the village. How long had he kept himself satisfied with the simple latex-sheathed sex, without the wonders of the eggs, the way they felt growing within him, a new life-form; and when they came out, the sound as they finally came out of his distended rectum; oh, how he drooled at the thought; erect once more, too; he had travelled by train, going off at a small farm station, where behind an electric tractor recharging station he had laid his eggs and left them under the setting sun. Maybe someone would eat them, maybe someone would take them in, shelter them, or maybe they’d just lay there, forgotten; the tragedy, the uncertainty of it all aroused him all the more.

  
He had travelled on the express trains from various stations, going far to the south once along the rural lines, sleeping as he did along the way with various people he’d encounter; the unquenched thirst of those 32 years spent in the village was like the reservoir of a dam that needed to be refilled; he slept with the tall handsome driver of a nightly goods train north from Kuri; that was how he ended up at Matsuura Junction, where he had caught the southbound express they had just departed. 

  
Tenteke was still stiff by the time his story was done. Saki and Hisui went ahead and fucked him, and then each other, and then Tenteke fucked Saki, too. 

  
Tenteke said he had nothing better to do but to follow them, and they enjoyed his company.

  
  
At Kuri Ministry Housing Village, they located a block with empty short-stay flats of the sort given up to visitors there on duties. There was a small single-storey lobby building that greeted them as they turned off the tree-lined walkway, a small flowery hedge growing around the periphery of each block; there, they were informed of a free flat of desired proportions, and were given the number. If seen from above, the building resembled a large H, the connector between the two slab sections being a service structure housing the lifts and associated equipment, and emergency stairs. The service structure connected on either side to long balconies from which the flats were accessed; on the opposite side of the structure, the buildings had generous balconies for each flat, some of them with a removable space between them, so that several flats could share the same balcony if those staying so wished. Each of the blocks was 20 storeys tall, and they got a flat quite high up; floor 16; from it, the view of the skies whose hue whispered of approaching afternoon was great, and the valleys, hills and rises overgrown with lush cycad trees, some enormously tall, a few, growing in the distance near what seemed to be a river half-hidden by the vegetation, seemed taller than the tower block they were in.   
Saki sat himself down on a chair on the balcony and spied over the concrete railing out over the world. Some flying critter left a tall tree and vanished into lower shrubs by the river. 

  
“It’s always a nice scenery down here,” Hisui spoke as he got out onto the balcony from inside the flat. “Have you been here before?”

  
“No, never this far south.”

  
“It’s beautiful the way the sun sets here, isn’t it? It’s a very slow kind of sun set, it begins early, but during the summer months it never quite fully sets. Something to do with the axial tilt of the planet or some such.”

  
“Kind of unsettling,” Saki replied with a frank expression.

  
“It’s just that you’re not used to it...”

  
“Where is the one from the train?”

  
“In the shower. Said he needed to purge his body or something. Wasn’t paying sufficient attention. How do we proceed with the mission?”  
“I’ll call the head office to see if there have been any new notices relating to this assignment, and then call ahead to the plantation. We’ll travel there tomorrow on one of the regular trains there.”

  
“What about the one in the shower? Is he coming along?”

  
“If he wants to...” Saki said slowly. “If he doesn’t, he can stay here. It shouldn’t be a problem, should it?”

  
“Not unless we run into some dangerous critters.”

  
“It can’t be that bad, can it?”

  
“I doubt it, but you never know. But it’ll be fun to have him along, anyway.” Hisui smiled. “I think I need a bit of a shower, too.” He went back into the flat. Saki got up off the chair and followed him. In the common room was two horse-shoe shaped sofas arranged around a square table in the middle, accessible from two points; a common arrangement that dated back into the nebulous past from which the only surviving traces were scattered buried ruins in high places difficult of access, that despite all changes that had occurred since remained ever popular. On the wall to Saki’s right was a series of sturdy bookshelves of black-veined dark wood, packed with literature of all kinds; on a small shelf a little to the side stood a black metal box with a spindly antenna; a portable radio. On his left there was no furniture against the wall, but instead it was covered in a vast mural of an ancient banished orgiastic ritual, which, though such debauchery had long ago ceased, was nevertheless preserved in art for the lasting impression it left.

  
Saki went to the kitchen and gripped the telephone handle that rested in a small aperture in the wall and dialled the number to the head office switchboard.

  
  
The train slowed and rattled across a narrow bridge, whose latticework of aged wood looked decrepit. Below rushed the brown muddy waters of some tributary of Miina River which Saki did not know the name of, downstream towards the Middleworld Ocean; they had already passed the main artery of the river, that which marked the border between Nyanmar proper and the wild world beyond. The undomesticated wilderness... Along the railway were erected tall fences. They passed by a small siding at which stood a bright red maintenance vehicle, and some people stood on its aluminium-railed roof platform controlling a small construction robot with a remote controller, their red outfits with their short skirts fluttering in the wind. A mere four trains per day served the outlying plantation, stopping at each of the ones along the line – there were quite a few – and dropping off and picking up wagons as required, usually only a handful of tanker wagons and a passenger carriage. 

  
The carriage they were in, too, was a smaller type of non-compartment carriage. There were seats arranged around small tables, open to a central passage, which emulated the common arrangement of Nyanmari common rooms. There were not many passengers, but Hisui was occupied by a chat with some others at the other end. 

  
Tenteke admired the unspoiled natural landscapes that passed them by. He seemed to see something in a clearing they passed.

  
“A snake!” he said. “A huge black snake! I’ve never seen one so large before...” His voice trailed off. “Are there many animals around these parts? The place really just looks dangerous.”

  
“Yes,” Saki replied. “Plenty of animal life, and not the sort of place you’d want to go for a leisure walk. It’s not as dangerous as it might seem though, as long as you know what to look for and how to handle any possible hazards. There are obviously risks involved... it’s not your average city-park. Say, Tenteke, ever heard of the so-called ‘Sentient Fern-Beasts’?”

  
Tenteke shook his head negatively. 

  
“It’s a legend that is common around these parts, that there are these great big mountains of brown wooden tendrils wrapped in fern-like leaf-fans roaming the woods, occasionally ending up in some village or other. It’s a pretty old legend, but it is not without basis in reality. There is a tree, the Akuke-tree, that grows in these very swampy jungles. It looks like a palm with luscious palm-leaves, and has a great fat grooved stem. From its top protrude these long vine-line tendrils that technically are another plant altogether, which form a symbiotic relationship with the palm. You see, in addition to the common way of deriving nutrient from the ground and the sun as in most plants, the tree is actually predatory. An active hunter.”

  
“Really?” Tenteke looked genuinely interested. Now and then he’d look out into the jungles they passed through, hoping mayhap to catch a glimpse of one of these trees. 

  
“The tree grows large fruits that hang like large clubs along the sides of the stem. They are black and oily and radiate a strong sweet odour that attracts many herbivores in the area, and they are, for those that succeed in getting them, highly nutritious, which makes it a risk worth taking. The vines I mentioned before, hang like curtains from the palm leaves of the tree, and when something comes within them, they close up and wrap themselves around any nearby objects. They are plants, so they do not have advanced neurological function, but they seem to be able to tell eventually that they have caught something animate or not, and will release the latter. Then, they rather elegantly, with concerted effort, lift the trapped specimen up, and this might go as fast as a mere fifteen minutes, and deposit it into an opening in the top of the stem. The trees have something of a parallel to animal digestive system. The opening leads down into a large cavity that sometimes is so wide that it forms a noticeable swelling on the trunk of the tree. This is filled with a pool of digestive enzymes, many surprisingly potent for a plant, and would be able to digest you and me in maybe two days or so.”

  
“So it just takes you in and drop you down, and you can’t get out of there?”

  
“Precisely.” Saki smiled.

  
“I’m sorry...” Tenteke said and blushed deeply, “The idea just arouses me tremendously...” And then Tenteke got up and lifted his pleated white skirt, showing his erection. “I must fuck you,” he said, his voice trembling and a bit nervous, but assertive nonetheless. Saki nodded consent, the blue hair falling across his face where he sat leaning forward, and he got up on the sofa, lying to his side, moving his right leg forwards; Tenteke took hold of it with one hand, and with one on the other, he moved closer, and with knees on the sofa and leaning over Saki, he entered with little resistance. 

  
Tenteke hammered away, as if he was beating down a particularly disobedient nail into a wall. Saki moaned and, Tenteke, breathing heavily, leaned down and gave him a sloppy deep kiss, their tongues intermingling like the earthworms in a cadaver, here and there and everywhere; Tenteke’s nails softly scratched against the back of Saki’s dress, then moved upwards, touched Saki’s face sensually, and just before he ejaculated voluminously once again, their hands met and fingers interlocked. 

  
“You two...” Hisui imparted suddenly as he materialised from his distant discussions. “Couldn’t you wait just a little longer? We’re almost at our destination.”

  
“Tenteke withdrew from Saki’s rectum slowly, his face blushing again, even deeper this time. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I couldn’t help myself... the thought of being helpless and slowly digested inside one of those trees that Saki spoke of just made me so eager.”

  
“Saki, you told him that old story again?”

  
Saki giggled in reply. “He didn’t even know about the sentient fern-beast legends! Anyway, nothing wrong with telling of the trees... it works to get people horny, doesn’t it?”

  
Hisui rolled his eyes. “Feels a bit cheap, though, don’t you think?”

  
“Nah.” Saki stroked his still erect prick through the fabric of the pleated skirt, and kicked with his boot towards Hisui’s crotch. “Come here,” he added, “come here and let me suck.”

  
Hisui smiled, as if that was what he had wanted to hear all along. He parted the shine of his coat and let his beautiful erection stand proud, and Saki frigged himself harder as he saw it. Eventually Saki was face to face with it, Hisui standing above him happily. Saki kissed its head and then opened his mouth to take it in, letting his teeth scrape tenderly along as he went. It was not long before Saki’s frigging brought himself to a spend, the sticky whiteness getting on the skirt and his right hand; with the left hand he stroked Hisui’s tense tender testicles, and Hisui must have watched Tenteke fuck him for some time and frigged himself as he did, for he was not long in coming too, the thick salty nectar ending up on Saki’s tongue. Hisui drew out and wiped his prick clear of saliva and traces of ejaculate with his bare hand, and sat down on the sofa next to Saki. Saki swallowed and put his head on Hisui’s lap. A hand patted his head gently. 

  
Tenteke sat down at the other end and stroked playfully the heel of Saki’s boots. Outside, it was high noon, and obnoxious insects played doomsday tunes with their legs. 

  
They arrived at their destination an hour later.

  
 **Chapter Three**

  
It was large. The concrete of the perimeter wall had been cracked open, a huge hole right through; steel rebar like fragments of bone through the cold rock-like flesh of the cadaver. Whatever had wrecked its way through must have been enormous, there was no doubt of it. Saki knew of no creature of the required size – but these regions were little explored by science, and there were frequent discoveries of new creatures. The jungles were inhospitable and dangerous, which made any exploration very hard to do without vast efforts by many people. 

  
The plantation facility had been evacuated, and along with support staff – people that normally tended to the effective operations of the facility itself – that had come with them on the train, they were the only ones at the site. They visited the dormitory facilities and checked staff lists and made sure all the bureaucratic requirements were fulfilled. The arrival of the replacement guard and observer was noted on the administrative white board at 23:17. He had immediately thereafter tried to seek out Kaiki, whom was due to go on an extended leave, to relieve the latter from his duties. Kaiki was expected to leave on the last train of out of the day. The replacement, whose name was Haku Wakama, had found the body, according to the interview by the Kuri militia, in a terrible state. Blood everywhere, body torn to shreds. The upper torso and all above it were missing, cut off by a ragged uneven cut. Haku had arranged for the delay of the last train departure, and he had assisted the body’s transportation to Kuri that same night, after closing up and securing the facility, taking whatever staff remained with him away. No one had been at the site since.   
They left the dormitory block and came out on the grassy garden again.

  
“Seen this?” Hisui said and pointed at a series of odd grooves in the ground near to the location where the wall had been breached. “Tracks of some kind. Like from the movement of some earthworm, if we disregard the size. The creature seems to have moved further ahead after slaying that poor bastard, but see here,” he pointed towards a deeper groove, more like a shallow burrow, “this must be where the thing, for whatever reason, turned around and headed back.”

  
There was a bank of earth that had been displaced next to the roughly metre-deep grove in the earth. A decorative fern tree of a popular Nyanmari garden variety had been displaced and leaned precipitously in the direction of the plantation site proper. Beyond a hedge in that direction grew neat rows of the trees from which the latex was extracted.

  
“I wonder why it would turn,” Saki said and bent down and touched the earth in the deepest of the tracks, “perhaps something with nature of the soil here was not to its liking... either way, we’re kind of getting ahead of the facts here.” Saki followed the tracks back to the aperture in the wall. Beyond lay wilderness. One could not see far, for the trees were thick and tall, vines hung from their stems dark-green and mossy, and the bacchanal chorus of some tree monkeys was heard above all the other noises of the jungle. Chirping of some unseen birds from the tree-tops, too, but not much else. Low-growing fern-bushes, occasional flowers and young trees growing painfully slowly in the shadow of their kin made up the eye-level undergrowth. 

  
Saki was not long in spotting the abnormality. “Look,” he said, and Tenteke, silent and shy as he was in this unfamiliar environment, perhaps even frightened by beasts born from his imagination that inhabited these territories, came up to the cracked wall and peered over the edge. On the other side, there were deep ruts cut in the ground, as if the creature had burrowed, or tried to do so, through the soil. In places these tracks were very deep, a good two-three metres and as wide as a double-track railway. The trees had been pushed aside by the immense thing. 

  
“Never heard of anything like this before,” Hisui said. “I’ve heard of the Southern Lake Snake, but even that can’t approach this thing in size. It’s no more than fifteen metres in length – at maximum. This thing, here... whatever it is, it’s huge. Unfathomable.”

  
“The good thing is, it’s not going to be too difficult to track it, as long as it doesn’t dive too far underground, if it is capable of that.”

  
“We’re going after it?” Tenteke exclaimed. “What? Why? What if we walk right into its mouth and...” He pulled on his skirt to keep it down. 

  
“End up _digested_ , you mean?” Saki said and moved up behind Tenteke, putting his right hand on the shoulder and the left hand stroking Tenteke’s prick softly through the shiny squeaking fabric. Tenteke blushed but said nothing. 

  
“This isn’t exactly the time for play,” Hisui said. 

  
“Feeling jealous?” Saki replied and squeezed hard on Tenteke’s cock. 

  
“No, it’s just that we’re in a situation that is at least a little dangerous...”

  
“We’re not sacrificing alertness for play.” Saki stroked Tenteke across the chest with his other hand, circling around a nipple and pinching it.   
“Fine,” Hisui said, with clear annoyance. “I’ll go get authorisation for weapons, to get the safe unlocked and retrieve them. You do whatever you want. Just don’t come to me when that thing comes back and eat you for being so loud.”

  
Saki rolled his eyes and leaned his head in on Tenteke’s shoulder, licking his ear with his tongue. “If it does, it’ll... digest us... we’ll get mixed up into one, a ball of enzymes...”

  
“Stop it!” Tenteke finally cried out, “it’s making me _too_ aroused. Now you’ll have to fuck me so I can stroke one out faster, okay?” He got on the ground, on all fours, and flipped his skirt up. He had not even cleaned since last. The teasing, on the other hand, had already aroused Saki as well, so he was not long in bringing his lance back out and pressing it up against Tenteke’s reluctant sphincter.

  
  
Elsewhere, meanwhile, Hisui navigated down a corridor inside the dormitory building, looking for a telephone station he had seen when they first passed through on the cursory exploration. He found it, as he had remembered, and dialled the number on the large wooden number and letter panel. He put the receiver to his ear and listened for the waiting tone as the call was connected. Then emerged the distant voice of the Force Authorisation Board representative, to whom he explained his position and the situation that they faced, and asked that the Rubber Plantation No. 17 Weapon Reserve be unlocked. The request was granted, and he ended the call after being given the short numerical code that would unlock it; this he entered on the small electronic box on the substantial steel door to the storage. 

  
The storage was not very large, but offered what he needed; high-powered electrical pulse rifles; he took two, one for himself and one for Saki, as well as a small box of extra batteries should they run out (each having enough charge for between 10-20 firings), which he put in a small synthetic sack (which also included a few other important supplies), which he threw over his shoulder after closing and re-sealing the steel door. 

  
With the two rifles, heavy and black, he went back outside. Tenteke had evidently came already, for there was a small pool of white wetness on the ground before him, and he now sat on his knees, with one hand on the upper parts of his white thigh-high boots and another grasping at Saki’s testicles while he sucked away at the length.

  
“Done yet? Ready to come?” Hisui asked and put the equipment down on the ground. 

  
“Don’t—” Saki whined betwixt heavy breaths and guttural moans, “interrupt—”

  
Hisui disregarded his friend’s wishes, lifted Saki’s black skirt and with his equipment exposed by opening the front of his coat, roughly prodded the lastly mentioned Saki’s rear. He protested with cute endearing moans that felt like rather the opposite, at least to someone so well-tuned to the cues of the Saki as Hisui was, and the hand that Saki reached back in a feeble attempt at preventing entry was nothing but a subtle joke. The wet hole welcomed Hisui without any great difficulty, and soon Saki could not help but finally spend within the warm enclosure of Tenteke’s mouth. Hisui, meanwhile, was not one known for being slow to come, and indeed, a dozen or so aimless plunging thrusts later, he was ready to come, and as this moment approach, he withdrew from Saki’s bottom and moved the latter aside. Tenteke still sat on his knees on the ground, with his hands frigging his prick. Hisui moved forth, cock in hand, and shoot his warm load into Tenteke’s mouth that receptively opened for the task. The white stringy spendings of both Saki and Hisui mixed in his mouth, something the latter found very exciting.

  
“Swallow it,” Hisui said, while wiping off some ejaculate that had got on his hand onto his thigh, like it was some skin lotion. Tenteke swallowed obediently, and Hisui bent over and kissed him on the lips.

  
Saki sat on a concrete block from the broken wall, recuperating from the ordeal, getting the strength back into his legs. “Hey,” he said as he saw the two others kiss, “I want some of that, too.” Hisui got up and walked over to Saki without saying a word, and kissed him, too, a deep long wet kiss.    “Happy now?” Hisui asked.

  
“Better,” said Saki. “I need to rest a bit more. My legs still feel a bit weak.”

  
“That is why it is never a good idea to fuck standing up.”

  
“Not my fault!” Saki smiled wryly. 

  
“I know. But we need to get on with this. This isn’t a leisure trip.” Hisui threw one of the energy-weapons towards Saki, who caught it as though this was some menial ball-game of the sorts young Nyanmarians in the countryside would often play in the absence of more entertaining things or lewd acts. 

  
“It’s a little bit of leisure,” Saki replied, “and a little bit of serious effort. Can I have one of those?” He eyed the two weapons placed on the ground.   
“Yes, one is for you. Is it a good idea to bring Tenteke along? It’s dangerous.”

  
“We’ve been over this,” Tenteke interjected, “and I insist that I come along, too. I don’t want to be left back here like I am a mere toy. Even if that is what I might be for the moment.” Then he smiled as if to add emphasis, and jumped up on some of the concrete rubble, past the protruding rebars, and walking down the slope of pulverised concrete. Some slipped down and left traces like miniature pyroclastic flows down the incline. Tenteke was near slipping, but grabbed hold of a concrete block with his arms and was steady. “Are you coming?” he turned around and asked. 

  
Hisui and Saki shrugged and smiled at one another before they followed the pioneer across the ruined slit in the perimeter wall. 

  
On the other side, the concrete fragments had fallen some distance and flattened a number of fern-bushes. Tenteke stood at the bottom of the slope, eating a red Jakunagi fruit he had just plucked off a shrub, waiting impatiently. Immediately ahead, deposits from the collapsed wall had erected a wall across a narrow stream, and on the other side, true jungle began. The thick undergrowth that bulged out of the dense forest swayed in a gust of wind, looking for an instance like a living organism. They went in, cutting when necessary their way through the foliage with a knife, brought along in the bag. 

  
The traces of the assailant were at first hard to detect. There were certain disturbances in the earth in places; a tree had been up-rooted and lay tilting perilously against a group of smaller trees. A rock had been ploughed some distance through the soft dark soil of the area and lodged into a decayed fallen tree’s stem, which had splintered at the impact. It seemed like, whatever it was that had travelled, it had roughly followed the northwards path of the river; following, perhaps, Saki suggested, some particular geologic formation. Upon encountering a small stream they realised the reason for the strange traces they had followed. The stream cut through the ridge they had been following, through the years resulting in a deep cutting maybe two metres wide and at least four metres deep. The water below was light brown with mud. In the middle of the ridge, there had been a land-slide and a disturbance of the ground; upon closer inspection, they realised, that the animal they were trying to track was subterranean, burrowing somehow through the earth. 

  
Trees and small rocks had been up-earthed and strewn about when the beast dove deeper into the soil. They took a course on the edge of the disturbance, whose muddy earth was not easily passable in their - for the purpose of exploration - very inadequate shoe wear.

  
A while after the cutting and the stream, it seemed that the underground soil through which the creature must be burrowing was thinning, for suddenly the jungle was split down the middle, trees and shrubs thrown aside. It was like they were walking down the body of an enormous murder victim who had been vivisected. The earth was turned as if by some god-proportioned agricultural machinery, over a vast area, at least ten metres across. They followed, stumbling and uneasy, the enormous cut. It began to rain, though the temperature remained pleasantly warm. 

  
Then they saw it. Something dark, slightly brown, maybe purple, like a gigantic eschar, visible through a parting of the trees; it lay along the shore of a tranquil lagoon. Its body was segmented and arched, thick and armoured. It didn’t move, lay still, as though it was dead. 

  
“Throw something at it,” Saki said. “To see if it is alive.”

  
Ah, all the weapons and tools of the modern world, and what it all came down to was a childish throwing of rocks on some animal. “Maybe it’ll be angry with us,” Tenteke said. 

  
Saki turned to him. “Are you sure it would see us? If it attacks, we’ll shoot it. Charge your rifle.” The last command was uttered at Hisui, who pressed a button his weapon, which then gave off a silent purring like a pleasantly napping cat. 

  
“I do wonder though,” Hisui added as Saki rummaged through some low leafy-shrubbery in search of an appropriate rock, “if that thing might just not be too big for us to kill.”

  
“Nonsense,” Saki said. “Just double the output of the rifle and make sure you aim for some sensitive part.”

  
“What is a sensitive part on that thing? I can’t see much, but it looks like a gigantic armoured burrowing pill-bug to me.”

  
“So? You shoot at the mouth when it tries to eat us, in that case.”

  
Tenteke’s prick erected up, lifting his skirt like a circus tent. “Don’t talk about those things...” he whimpered.

  
“Right, sorry about that...” Saki’s voice trailed off as he found a rock, picked it up, and threw it out of the jungle in the direction of the animal. It was enormous, but just how large was hard to judge from their position. Nothing happened. Did it miss? Saki wondered. He found another rock, larger this time, and threw it as far as he could in the direction of what he assumed might be the head, judging by the fact that the other end seemed to taper more gradually. 

  
The rock hit it with the sound of stone on stone. Boulders slamming against a cliff-face. The rock bounced off and into the water nearby. The thing moved, slowly, shifting it’s monstrous body. Then it turned in the direction of the lagoon and vanished into the waters, which were clear and thus offered continued observation; the creature moved along the bottom and then, in what must be the deepest portion, stopped. It couldn’t be more than a metre below the surface. It twitched and stirred up clouds of muddy bottom sludge into the waters like some camouflage.

  
“We need a boat,” Hisui said. “Or something. We can’t well just dive into the waters, can we? Charge at it like that, we’d be dead in a second.”

  
“The map in back at the plantation indicated that there would be a handful of scattered small river fishing villages around here. Perhaps we could locate one of those and get a ride?” Saki relaxed his rifle. 

  
“Do you think they’d be easy to convince?”

  
“Probably...” Saki replied. “I mean, why not?”

  
“You’re right...” 

  
Tenteke just hung on like some appendage. 

  
They walked back, following the riverfront this time. In places it was muddy and difficult to get through, but they could usually climb (albeit a bit clumsily) via thick climbing vines and parasitic trees that grew horizontally to the ground and by that effort escape the most marshy portions. It took far longer than following the trail the beast had left. They were not worried that the thing would vanish in their absence – it had, after all, stayed near to the lagoon for at least two days since the attack – so there was not much of a hurry. Eventually, they spotted the roof tiles of some buildings rising above the medium-height riverside woodlands. As they got closer, they saw the raised platforms on which the buildings had been erected – the area being prone to floods during the rainy season – and a small set of wooden docks where was anchored countless wooden fishing boats, though many were equipped with modern battery-powered motors. 

  
It was a good distance across, however, some forty metres or so at least. However, a lone shape sat with bare feet dangling just above the surface of the tranquil river at the wooden pier’s end, watching intently the red bobber in the water before him. They shouted, waved their hands, and eventually the fisher turned his gaze from the slovenly flowing waters to them. He must have managed to hear something of what they were saying, for he put his rod on the pier and got into one of the boats, started the engine, and revved across the cream-coloured muddy waters. 

  
He drove up onto the shore. The throngs of reeds were pushed aside, the mud was cloven like rotten flesh. 

  
“You needed assistance?” said the fisherman. He was a short one, with tall black ears of unusual size whose fur looked uncannily smooth. His skin was dark from the sun and he wore black clothes, a tiny pair of shorts and a loosely fitted jacket that was open, revealing his tanned chest. He wore no shoes at all – probably because he had just wanted to dip his feet in the water while fishing. 

  
“We’d need to borrow your boat for a little trip,” said Hisui. “I hope that would not be a problem?”

  
“Oh, not really,” said the fisherman. “Not at all, to be fair. Are you going after that thing?”

  
Saki and Hisui looked at each other. “You know about it?” Hisui asked.

  
“We’ve seen it around for a few days, over in that lagoon and moving back and forth towards the rubber plantation.” 

  
“Yes, it’s that thing we’re going after.”

  
“Hesitate no further – get aboard then,” the fisherman said. He backed away from the fore and went to the engine controls and started it up again. The battery-powered motors silently whirred into action as Saki, Hisui and Tenteke went aboard. Hisui stroked his rifle suspiciously while looking at the fisherman, as if he believed those silly stories told in the hinterland of rapacious uncivilised so-called ‘frontier peasants’. “My name’s Atsuki,” the fisherman added. “You’re from the north, right? The cities?” 

  
“I guess,” Saki said, who sat closest. 

  
“We had a feeling someone would show up to go after that huge bug. Sort of a bet. And here you are.” He smiled. “And you,” he continued, looking at Hisui, “you think we’re simple-minded rapists without a thought in our heads, right? I can see it.”

  
Hisui didn’t respond. He just blushed. The boat rocked as it passed the waves where a smaller stream flowed into the river, and Tenteke fell on the floor. “Try being more careful!” Atsuki said. They came up to the split where the lagoons lay. Clear water flowed slowly into the main river.   
“Saki,” Hisui said, “take the controls of boat.”

  
Atsuki was going to object, but he eventually moved, and when he sat down on one of the brown leather seats, Tenteke, who was still on the floor of the boat, was nibbling at the groin of his shorts hungrily, and at that he was not going to object; he reached down into his shorts and guided his prick out through one of the leg-holes, allowing Tenteke to suck it.

  
With Saki at the controls, they quickly came up to the dark outline of the monstrous being in the shallows. It sensed their presence, and turned like a serpent in the water, stirring up clouds of sand. It moved in undulating movement, raising waves on the surface of the still lagoon, and set course forthwith for the river proper. Saki turned and gave chase. 

  
The beast took a short cut, crawling out of the waters with its enormous bulk and crossing a small sandbank, leaving traces of deep little cuts in the mud from its feet, and then with a cascade of frothing water it vanished into the muddy river flow; leaving in its wake a trail of rapids and waves which they followed as they too made the turn into the river. 

  
It was fast, at least as fast, if not slightly faster, than the boat could manage. Tenteke was still at Atsuki the fisherman’s crotch, like a leech. Saki looked at amused at them in the fore. If they bumped off a wave now, maybe Tenteke would bite the cock off. He smiled to himself.

  
  
The river widened and they passed countless villages. Soon the river was as more like an inlet, each shore visible only in the distance; the creature was heading straight for the ocean. 

  
“What do we do when we get to the ocean?” Saki asked, turned to Hisui. He held his rifle, face an expression of irritation, perhaps with the escaping monstrosity. 

  
“Just go on,” Hisui replied. 

  
Then, not even the distant jungle-shores were visible any longer, no far-off fishing vessels; just a few scattered barren rocks (on one of them an ancient wooden shipwreck).

  
Tenteke was sitting up now, clinging to the side of the boat. The waves were larger, the waters a cloudy deep emerald. The thing swam close to the surface, keeping a straight path. It had slowed slightly, as they were gaining on it. It might have become exhausted. 

  
It breached the surface. It had stopped completely, abruptly, and now lay still, not moving. Hisui got up, and aimed his rifle at it. 

  
Something moved on it, something pale, whose colour seemed to shift slightly; changing from something blue-tinged to an angry red; then it moved, slipped into the water after scraping against the hard shell of the bug, splashing wetly back into the depths. 

  
“What’s wrong with it?”

  
Atsuki stood up and looked in that direction. Saw the vast shape of something move deep in the water, something huge and off-coloured; it glowed blue. “We better get back to shore,” he said. “It looks like your target has been slain.”

  
“We went all this way for nothing? And the monster was killed by what?” Hisui looked even more irritated now. The thing had essentially gotten away from him. Escaped, mayhap into the jaws of another predator, but escaped nevertheless. 

  
“Oh,” he said, “I don’t know what you fancy city-folk might call it, but down here, we just call it the Sea Dragon.”

  
“What is it?”

  
“Just a squid.”

  
“Oh.”

  
“Not just your average squid, but a damn huge squid. Generally it's no threat to boats... It doesn't seem to attack boats or people. The tales say it is because it's brain is the size of a house.”

  
The dark segmented shell of the bug rose out of the water, its base wrapped in a blue mess of wet tentacles covered with enormous suckers the size of railway carriages, a few of which were exposed. The body of the thing rose like an island out of the water, with eyes larger than their little boat. The wake it made sloshed against it, rocked it harshly. Its eyes looked in their direction; and Saki then forthwith turned the other way, heading back towards shore. The bug sunk into the deep, swallowed by a whirlpool of frothy water, leaving in its wake a badly stirred see that looked like it was in a boiling pot. The blue squid of proportions beyond sanity’s limit sunk back into the depth, and birds circled the dead fish and bottom sludge dislodged by the beasts movement, their sick calls echoing all the way to the departing boat.

  
And so they got off on a beach of black volcanic sand, and thanked the fisherman for lending his boat, and the three thin figures walk up the beach to a small house, asking for directions, and after getting those, walk for half an hour to a nearby railway station by a small village of ancient sand-cottages where, after waiting for a good hour for the sparse rural service of a single motorised carriage, they were finally on their way. The sun was setting, obnoxious birds and insects sang in unison, and soon they were on their way back to civilisation, home.


End file.
